Film · 1997 · Films · 1990s
Nil by Mouth
Scored from 75 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Gary Oldman's directorial debut watches an extended family on a South East London council estate. Raymond drinks and takes cocaine through long nights in pubs and clubs, then comes home to Valerie, his pregnant wife, who manages his jealousy and, when it turns, his fists. Her younger brother Billy, a heroin addict, is beaten and thrown out for stealing from Ray, and shuttles between dealers and the flat of their chain-smoking mother Janet and grandmother Kath. Written from Oldman's own childhood, the film proceeds through kitchens, betting shops and profane monologues rather than plot, observing how a family absorbs and excuses what one man does. Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke lead.
Released in 1997, Nil by Mouth is a drama film. It runs 2h 8m and carries an R certificate. It was made in the United Kingdom.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 416 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. Only 75 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 79 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Nil by Mouth lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1990s (4,082 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 75.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
